The RevJet Creative-Side Platform: March Madness for Display Advertising

In offices around the country, people are getting distracted from work by their March Madness brackets. This year, March Madness will cost U.S. businesses an estimated $1.9 billion thanks to the distraction of official brackets and office pools. There's an even a petition on Change.org, asking to make it a national holiday.

Tens of millions of Americans set up brackets and participate in office pools. Even President Obama takes a break from leading the free world to bet on college basketball.

For the team here at RevJet, every month is like March Madness...at least when it comes to optimizing digital display ads. RevJet's proprietary method of creative optimization keeps digital ads in constant competition with one another in order to drive performance improvements of 100 to 400%. With ads constantly competing in new experiments, like the progressing brackets, marketers can be sure they're always running the best ads they've got.

Creative Competition in the RevJet CSP

The RevJet CSP powers unlimited, simultaneous optimization experiments for all of your digital display creatives. Unlike other testing tools with limited functionality, RevJet automatically creates statistically sound, perfectly designed experiments that marketers can easily create, then set and forget.

That’s what makes it easy to create so many experiments, with minimal effort and no chance for human error, to perpetually drive dramatic increases in ad performance.

The PIVOT Method

The RevJet CSP is a powerful platform, but you get more out of it if you apply our proprietary methodology for creative optimization, which we call the PIVOT method (Perpetual Iterative Velocity-Oriented Testing). The PIVOT method was developed over more than a decade of creative optimization experience and we’ve found that it drives the best results. Creative testing with no rhyme, reason, or methodology will still often yield some performance increases, but creative optimization with the PIVOT method can yield continuous increases of 100% or more.

Creative optimization on its own doesn’t have a whole lot to do with March Madness, but there are some striking similarities between this methodology and the bracket system that governs the college basketball tournament.

Concept Testing and Iteration Cycles

The PIVOT method suggests an systemic order for pitting ads against one another, in which the winner of one experiment is entered into the next—just like advancing in the March Madness tournament.

Under PIVOT, the first experiment is always a concept test, which means that all ads in the experiment should look dramatically different from one another. We’ve found that concept tests tend to drive the most dramatic lift. Once you’ve found a winning concept, you can move on to smaller, less dramatic changes. Here’s an example of what three distinct concepts might look like:

The winner of the concept experiment will then be iterated upon and entered into a new test, of more similar ads, testing something specific, for example, different backgrounds. That second test (think of it as the Sweet Sixteen round) might look like this:

When the background experiment completes, you might change headlines or copy (let’s call this the Elite Eight), like this:

And so on and so forth, you could, for example, have a final four that tests the effect of different forms of animation.

March Madness for Your Digital Display Ads

March Madness is many people’s favorite time of year, but for marketers at RevJet, the competition lasts all year…at least when it comes to display advertising.